MAKING OF A MISFIT

As if from nowhere, the dumpy, determined woman descended one day in February 1974 on the headquarters of the Hearst food-giveaway program in San Francisco. "God has sent me," she declared and rapidly took over as bookkeeper for the charity operation, known as People in Need, or PIN, that Randolph Hearst and his wife Catherine, in response to demands of the Symbionese Liberation Army, had hastily set up in an attempt to win their daughter Patty's freedom. Within a short time, Sara Jane Moore had elbowed her way into the program's inner circle, but not without leaving some bruises. "She was pushy, nosy, and wanted to take over," said the program's former director, A. Ludlow Kramer.

Through her involvement with PIN, Sara Jane Moore soon became a kind of radical groupie. During the next 18 months, as she wandered through the small, semiclandestine parties, splinter groups and cells that make up "the Movement" in the Bay Area, Moore turned from enchanted novice into an FBI informer and then into a Marxist convert, only to be ostracized as a despised pariah after she confessed her informant role. The atmosphere of conspiracy and danger provided a sense of action and purpose that her life was lacking. "I was really nervous, but I was intrigued by the whole thing," she once said. "It was like a grade-B movie."

Moore liked to pretend that she was born into the Southern aristocracy. After wangling an invitation to visit the Hearst estate, she boasted that she had entered through the front door, implying that quality respected quality. Actually, she was born on Feb. 15,1930, into a middle-class family in Charleston, W. Va., where a candy-store keeper remembers that both she and, a few years later, Charles Manson, another Charleston resident, shopped for sweets. Her family name was Kahn; Moore is her mother's maiden name. After high school, she joined the WACS and received her first newspaper notice in the early 1950s by collapsing, suffering from amnesia, in front of the White House.

Nothing ever seemed to work out for her. She was married to four men, one of them twice, and abandoned three children, whom her parents finally adopted after frustrated attempts to have her arrested for failure to support them. She kept her fourth child, Frederick, 9, the offspring of her marriage to a former movie sound man named John Aalberg, whom Moore liked to describe to friends as "a biggie in Los Angeles—you'd know him." After the breakup of her most recent marriage, to a San Francisco-area doctor, she was forced to leave her $75,000 home in Danville for failure to meet mortgage payments, and she eventually moved into San Francisco's Mission District, an uneasy mixture of ethnic blue-collar families and counterculture groups.

Meanwhile, Sara Jane was having trouble holding a job for long, even though she was a competent accountant. "If she had only shut up and done her job, everything would have been fine," says one recent employer. "But she couldn't shut up for ten minutes."